The Prince’s Pizza

Sooo, Einarr has been baking pizzas here and there, and no joke, he’s really good at it! He’s showing surprising care and dexterity for someone whose first instinct is to punch everything as hard as they can. The dough is wonderfully crispy and chewy and fluffy, all at the same time. And the toppings… yum. But he’s strangely secretive about it. I don’t know why… Hey…what…dammit Einarr leggo of my pen…

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Meowjito

So lets write it down here The Meowjito will at one point be THE summerdrink … but noone will know it was invented by a scrubby Cat working at a Tavern missing home….

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A cinnamony Tabuleh

Make dishes with Catnip they said! Dishes with catnip they get.

So to answer the question how does catnip taste to humans. For sure not as wonderful and elating as it does to me and my fello Tabaxi friends! But it still does have a nice mint note and subtle cinnamony herbal flavours. So it fits into a lot of foods. For example this Tabuleh.

First cook the Quinoa … totally oversalt the quinoa … be forced to cook even more Quinoa mix the all of it together and get a perfectly salted quinoa mush. Then chop and grill some aubergine and zucchini and add them to the quinoa. Add a lot of finely chopped catnip and cilantro. give it some lime juice and olive oil . Mix in chopped tomatoes, cucumber, red onion and dates. Then grill some peach and coconut flakes add them to the whole mush and add a little cinnamon to taste. Summerly freshly yummness.

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Chicken & Potato Gumbo

Gumbo is fun. Firstly, it’s cooked with beer, that’s a plus (admittedly, the alcohol cooks out). Secondly, making the roux for gumbo feels like an elaborate dare just how dark you can make it before it starts to burn.
Takes me back. We used to have enchanted jars to keep hot food with us, they were prized as much as a good pickaxe. I sold mine to buy my first lute. It wasn’t all that good, but it was a lute… Hm, I’m sure one could muse about selling your past to dream of a future…
But those were the times. A hard day of work, a hot bowl of stew, a quiet place deep underneath the earth.
That’s the thing, people often don’t know how quiet a mine can be. You see, if you’re feeling pompous and vain you carve big mountain halls. Large spaces, square angles, flat walls. Sound will bounce around like a tireless child. But when you’re mining, you don’t care about aesthetics. You don’t negotiate with the mountain about which path would look pretty, you choose the softer stone and avoid the harder bits. Some natural cavities here, a mined vein of ore there, and you end up with a ragged network of spaces where no two surfaces point the same way. And the way sound bounces there, not knowing which way to go, makes it sound unusually quiet and muted, like no other place in the world. A hard day of work, a hot bowl of stew. I remember I started to sneak away to find a secluded place, eat my food and hum melodies of fledgling songs. The birth of a bard, in the quiet of the mountain.

When the world is all weird angles, you don’t know which way to bounce, heh…

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Croque Madame

Leaving Niflheim and the monotony of mining opened my eyes to how the world is such a dance of people coming and going, each person passing by being a deep well of stories waiting to be told.

One of my earlier exposures to that was when I was working as a dishwasher to get by, my skills as a bard still hopelessly underdeveloped. There came this woman, human, 50-ish years of age if I had to take a guess, and she began to tell stories from her home country far away. I only caught bits and pieces between the work, but she radiated life. Within minutes she commanded people’s attentions.

Where she was from, they’d call a tavern not “tavern” but a “bistro”, and she recounted how they’d sit leisurely in the sun and enjoy coffee and a snack in the company of good friends. One of those dishes being a so-called “Croque Madame”, which supposedly translates into “crunchy lady” or something…?

Ham and cheese between two slices of bread, a hint of mustard, a fried egg and some more cheese sauce on top. Not a mere sandwich, but a layered symphony of comforting tastes.

Here’s my try. I would hope to capture some of that “schwoa… schoi…” – dammit, my pronunciation sucks, but I think it’s spelled “joie de vivre”… – I’d hope to capture some of that sometime, in my cooking, or my music.

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